Our aforementioned all-night overnight flight is two flights. A short leg and a long leg. SFO → LAX (one hour), then LAX → YYZ (four hours plus three time-zone hours).

The long leg’s plane is not even half full, so most of the passengers move to their own row and stretch out across all three seats and go to sleep. The flight crew turns off the cabin lights, but they leave on the lurid purple-and-pink ceiling accent lights that are evidently part of the Virgin America brand. This dim purple-and-pink overhead glow gives the otherwise darkened cabin a surreal, dreamlike, pimped-out neon-lined Candyland appearance somewhere between sci-fi nightclub and fairground funhouse. All up and down the cabin, the walls and ceilings flicker intermittently with spectral reflections from the few in-seat TV screens that haven’t been shut off.

Laura moves to her own row and sleeps. I try to sleep for a little bit but mostly stay up and read. A few times I glance around the cabin and see that no one except me has their overhead reading light turned on. And so many people are lying down that no tops of heads are visible. I am left with the disquieting sensation that I’m the only passenger on the plane, and am stuck under a tiny weird spotlight. The nighttime view out the windows shows great bursts of constellations, calm flat oceans of dimly visible moonlit clouds, luminous cobwebbish patterns of cities creeping by on the ground, and, once, the bright white downward vertical streak of what is either a shooting star or a satellite whose warranty is up.

We land in Toronto at seven on Saturday morning. Customs is cake. We wrestle our luggage (some of which bears Virgin America’s angry red HEAVY tag, shown above) into the ice-cold Yaris and start sleepily speeding home to Hamilton. En route we stop for a bad diner breakfast to bring us back to Hamiltonian reality after all those fancy-pants California breakfasts. Once home at the Hotel Fantod we do brief battle with a sadistic screaming smoke detector that is demanding a new battery, and once true silence descends we then collapse into bed from something like ten until half past three in the afternoon. Upon waking we do our best to eradicate our remaining jetlag and post-vacation blues with cheap Australian wine, cheaper Italian comfort food, and a viewing of Gone With the Wind, which incidentally at 233 minutes is pretty much the same length as our flight’s long leg. Tomorrow is another day.

Sweet mother of duty-free Gucci. I am writing this while sitting in an airport terminal. Typing on my iPad. Abusing the glacial free airport wi-fi. Haven’t ever blogged from an airport before. The experience is unthrilling yet somehow strangely hilarious. I am at SFO, killing time, waiting to board an all-night overnight flight back to Toronto. I have consumed half of a spectacularly greasy wood-fired airport pizza and 100% of a cold bottle of airport Heineken and I am sitting with Laura in a secluded row of airport chairs made of matte black airport faux leather and enjoying the spooky airport atmosphere, a ceaseless parade of murmuring luggage and twinkling cellphones and the vaguely discernible apparitions that bear them from place to place. Please disregard this post. This is just to say that I am blogging from an airport. It is something I have never done before.

Above: A painting I hate in a photo I like. — Below: Mark Strand, “Paintings”, from Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More.

The paintings of A were of rock piles
The paintings of B were influenced by A
The paintings of C were of miracles flattened
The paintings of D were of cruise ships on fire
The paintings of E captured a lost transparence
The paintings of F contained a number of frozen animals
The paintings of G seemed always larger at night
The paintings of H announced the approach of the unreachable
The paintings of I completed themselves endlessly
The paintings of J stood in relation to nothing
The paintings of K were like parties under water
The paintings of L acknowledged the power of chance
The paintings of M offered readings of sunrise and smoke
The paintings of N left nothing to the imagination
The paintings of O contained elements of emptiness
The paintings of P were of babies swimming
The paintings of Q were of nudes having lunch
The paintings of R foretold the coming of midnight
The paintings of S seemed to shrink as they were looked at
The paintings of T were conceived in unison
The paintings of U referred to the Age of Vegetables
The paintings of V concealed their humble origins
The paintings of W hastened the end of self-portraiture
The paintings of X suggested a fury of something-or-other
The paintings of Y couldn’t be looked at without music
The paintings of Z died of neglect the minute they were shown

We are now in the fourth week of the construction goons’ destroy-and-repair job on our parking garage, and I am close to losing my mind. It is the noise. I did not expect the noise. It is not the goons’ fault; they are just doing their job. It is my fault for having such tender ears and such a low mind-loss threshold.

Before the work started, I guess I imagined that the goons would be working distantly underground down in the garage the whole time and we would hear nothing of them. However. They have set up an enormous engine bunker outside the garage entrance, just below our windows. They run cables and cords and hydraulic tubes down into the garage and then open up with what sound like jackhammers down in the lower levels. We do not hear nothing of them — we hear nothing except them.

Every weekday, from eight in the morning till four or five at night, the huge engine hellaciously thrums and chugs, every so often spewing white and black exhaust out of its bunker’s rooftop’s shuddering pipes, and the noise blasts through our windows like they’re not even there and fills up our place with a constant jet-airliner roar overlaid with a shrill industrial whine, like the restroom hand-dryer of the gods.

The noise of the jackhammers, meanwhile, conducts with remarkable clarity up through the concrete and the walls and the pipes and the ventilation, and in our place seems to emanate from every direction, in every room, the sound of an Uzi with an infinite magazine being fired into an empty oil drum, not deafeningly loud, but very attention-getting, let’s just say, and after a month I do not seem to be growing used to it. (And we are looking at at least two more months of this still ahead.)

Working from home with this punishing new soundtrack in my ears all day requires some adaptation. I must seclude myself back in the office room, away from the sunlight and the open space and the screaming windows. I must listen to music through the skull-crushing headphones more often than usual, and at less-neighborly-than-usual decibel levels when listening alfresco. And I must not listen to good music. Good music, to me, tends to have dynamics, subtleties, ups and downs, variations in tone and texture and rhythm, no matter what genre. But music with these fine qualities cannot stand up to the engine/jackhammer noise, even with headphones involved; the machines’ racket always bleeds through and bugs me. So I’ve found that the only surefire way to avoid my being annoyed or tormented or driven insane by the engine and the jackhammers is to listen to music that sounds like engines and music that sounds like jackhammers. It is shaping up to be a very metal autumn.

Today: I am under the weather that is itself under other weather.

One more bottle post to make it three in a row. Shown above is Hermann’s Dark Lager, a Canadian craft beer made by Vancouver Island Brewery, of Victoria, British Columbia. I consume a bottle or two of this beer at the Driftwood Patio Restaurant in Ucluelet, British Columbia during our trip to Vancouver Island in July 2007.

I order the beer because of its name, of course. I’ve never seen my last name on a beer before, so I have to try it. It is not exactly the same spelling, but, you know, close enough. The beer is not bad. That is the sum total of my memory of it. For specifics I refer you to the brewery’s tasting notes:

Hermann’s full bodied flavour is uniquely balanced with a subtle hop impression. A toasty malt nose is confirmed with similar flavours on the palate that take on a nutty character.

Not that I can expect to try it again anytime soon, since you can’t buy it here in Ontario, and I’m not holding out hope that any local restaurants will start serving it.

Note: The jolly, barrel-chested, lederhosen-wearing, stein-hoisting Bavarian-type fellow on the above label — which fellow is presumably supposed to be the titular Hermann himself, but reminds me indelibly of Hans Breitmann’s Barty — seems to have been the result of a recent rebranding for Vancouver Island Brewery. He was not on the bottles I got. The ones I got featured the brewery logo’s obese orca.

Anyway, my pseudo-namesake beer is one of three things we remember about the Driftwood restaurant. The second thing is our enjoyment of the place’s tasty but somewhat unsavorily-named “Driftwood Chowder”, which I am pleased to report contains no actual driftwood. The third thing is when we see a car of European tourist dudes drive past our window and Laura says they look like: a carful of Brad Pitts.

I appreciate that both Twitter and Facebook have founders with namesake bourbons. Twitter: Evan Williams. Facebook: Maker’s Mark.

Above: Wines for writers: The Scribbler and the Procrastinator. (At Wits’ End, even.)